Three cheers for HM Queen Elizabeth II

For Britain, the Queen has been a source of strength and continuity for 70 years

By Alper Ali Riza

2022 is the Queen’s platinum jubilee year. She has been served by 12 prime ministers during her seventy-year reign. Her role is to counsel, encourage and to warn her governments but otherwise to stay strictly neutral in political matters.

The hope in times of crisis such the present one over Ukraine is that as she has a lot more experience in foreign affairs than the lightweight Boris Johnson and his featherweight foreign minister Liz Truss, she is advising them in the strongest terms to avoid sleepwalking into war with Russia.

Elizabeth became queen aged 25 while on a visit to Kenya when her father King George VI died on February 6, 1952. ‘The King is dead long live the Queen’ encapsulates the transition of monarch to monarch when a king is succeeded by his eldest daughter. And so it was that she flew back to a gloomy London as queen to be greeted at the airport by her prime minister, Winston Churchill.

The constitution does not allow an interregnum and as heir to the throne Elizabeth became queen on the death of her father automatically. Her coronation was in June 1953 to allow for a period of mourning.

I remember the coronation because my father brought coronation mugs home from work in Limassol. He was a loyal subject and lamented severing ties with HM the Queen as head of state after independence in 1960. He believed we could have kept her as head of state for a couple of decades longer to see us through the formative years of independence. It was not to be, and we made a fine mess of self-government within three years of being unleashed from the harness of colonial rule; but that’s the path history dictated and hindsight is not a good torchlight to shine on historical events.

For Britain, however, the Queen has been a source of strength and continuity. The idea behind constitutional monarchy is that the head of state represents the past, the present and the future much better than elected heads of state. There are arguments both ways, but for Britain and Scandinavia having a royal head of state works. It didn’t work in Russia where Tsar Nicholas II and his family were executed in 1918, and it didn’t work in Greece where King Constantine fled and was then voted down in a referendum.

The affection the British have for the Queen is personal. The tradition of giving three cheers for HM the Queen, repeated last week at the start of her platinum jubilee with outbursts of ‘hip, hip hooray’ in her honour is amusing to foreigners but it is touchingly revealing.

Three cheers for HM is a mark not just of her popularity but of the public’s affection for her that no politician can match. Three cheers for prime minister Boris Johnson for example would ring hollow and produce a cacophony of expletives and boos, but not for the Queen for whom tough soldiers, sailors and airmen shout ‘hip, hip hooray’ with relish as it comes naturally.

As a Queen’s Counsel I would, of course, say that, but like many other fictions in the law, QCs do not advise the Queen on law or anything else, least of all on British constitutional law which she knows better than any member of the legal profession. For obvious reasons she knows the laws and conventions of the British constitution, but she is also knowledgeable about broad principles of the constitutions of the Commonwealth.

My previous head of chambers at Paper Buildings in the Temple, Sir Desmond De Silva QC, was the only QC I know who actually talked to the Queen about his cases. He had been married to Princess Katarina of Serbia and met the Queen informally on occasions as his wife was family.

Sir Desmond died in mysterious circumstances in 2017, and I found an amusing vignette of an exchange between them in his obituary in the Times. The Queen: “I know exactly who this man is,” she said when he was presented to her after the opening ceremony for the Memorial Gates on Constitution Hill in 2002. “And what interesting case are you doing at present?” she asked with a smile. “War crimes Ma’am” he replied.

Apparently in their previous encounters he had amused HM with stories about all the guilty people he got off including the famous Liverpool and Zimbabwe goalkeeper, Bruce Grobbelaar, who was caught on camera receiving money allegedly to fix matches. “Would you ever throw a match?” De Silva asked Grobbelaar at trial regardless of the evidence. “No sir,” Grobbelaar replied and the jury believed him.

Apart from De Silva and his interesting cases, Queen’s Counsel do not get to meet the Queen at all

The nearest they get to the Queen is an invitation to one of her summer garden parties where they have to wear morning suit and top hat and stroll in the Buckingham palace garden and take tea and cucumber sandwiches.

As for the future of the monarchy itself, who knows? People are happy with Queen Elizabeth but as I say her popularity is personal. The picture of her sitting alone in church masked up in black mourning her beloved husband Prince Philip Duke of Edinburgh who was about to be laid to rest will not easily be forgotten when contrasted with the louche regime run by prime minister Boris Johnson. The Queen was there for people during the pandemic lockdown while Downing Street played loud music and drank cheap wine. You could not make it up. Three cheers for HM indeed.

Alper Ali Riza is a queen’s counsel in the UK and a retired part time judge